In a world that seems happy with "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero," Nintendo is finally releasing its own major music game next week, "Wii Music."
This week, Nintendo let four members of the MTV News team try the game to find out how it's similar and how it's different from those wildly successful music games.
How is it the same? Almost not at all. "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" use controllers shaped like guitars and drums. "Wii Music" lets users choose from more than 60 instruments — from harp and guitar to galactic piano and "dog suit" — which they pretend to play by shaking the Wii Remote and Nunchuk controllers.
All three games allow you to play along to famous songs. But with "Wii Music," it's improvisation that's emphasized. In the better-known music games, players follow a set note pattern, pressing buttons or hitting color-coded drums to keep a popular rock song playing out of their TV speakers. Improvisation is limited to the moments when players hit the whammy bar or rattle out a drum fill.
For "Wii Music," there is no pattern to follow. The developers of the game have programmed the songs to sound somewhat correct no matter how the player uses the controller. Playing in proper time causes the proper notes to come out, and swinging the Wii controllers in between those notes causes extra notes to play, theoretically without harming the melody of the song. A good player of "Wii Music" winds up creating their own version of a song, like a rock star adding their own twist to a cover.
The strangest thing about "Wii Music" — setting it apart from just about every other major game — is that there doesn't appear to be a way to win or lose. This was evident in July when the game was debuted at the E3 gaming show. At the time, a reporter questioned "Wii Music" lead designer Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of "Donkey Kong" and "Mario") about whether one should call "Wii Music" a toy rather than a game.
"Yes, that's right," Miyamoto told the reporter. "And that's why it's more interesting than a video game."
When MTV News tried the game earlier this week, it certainly didn't feel like we were playing a game. There were no points to score. There was no way of failing to complete the song, which is the standard hazard of playing poorly in a game like "Rock Band." The MTV quartet simply played, finished, decided whether what was played sounded any good and then, quite a few times, went back to try to perform an even more interesting version. Sometimes instruments were changed: Instead of playing the theme to "Chariots Of Fire" with two guitars, a piano and timpani drums, we tried a beat-boxer, a guy in a cat suit (who can meow) and a bass guitar. Finished songs can be stamped with an album cover and sent over Internet-connected Wiis to players' friends.
"Wii Music" has some extras, including a drum-training program that uses the Wii's balance board as bass-drum pedal. And it includes some very basic music-matching games, including one that requires players to listen to and group together pairs of characters who are singing or playing instruments at various pitches.
Where "Wii Music" may stand the most out, at first listen, from those other big music games, however, is the song list. "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" track lists include famous songs from the likes of Fall Out Boy, Metallica or AC/DC. "Wii Music" has 40-something tracks that include '80s pop (Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go") and video game tunes (the "Super Mario Brothers" theme song).
It's quite a combination: that "Wii Music" song list, the emphasis on creativity over competition, the shaking-centric controls, the silly graphics and non-game-like design. It is easy to conclude that "Wii Music" might not seem as cool to players of "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero." But the Wii once didn't seem as cool as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Is Nintendo onto something? Gamers can start playing "Wii Music" when it launches on October 20, to see how it compares to music gaming's current heavyweight champs.
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